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Monday, June 6, 2011

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, the companies behind the three major search engines Bing, Yahoo and Google, have launched a new initiative to add meta data to an HTML document. This meta data is used by the aforementioned search engines to improve the displaying of search results.

The reader of this HTML fragment immediately sees that this is something about product information. A computer program, like a search engine instead, cannot determine that this information is actually about products.

To help search engines, and potentially other software, understand the meta information behind the information, http://www.schema.org describes a shared vocabulary which can be used to add meta data to HTML tags.

By adding the itemscope attribute, you are telling the information between the div element is about a particular item. The itemtype attribute narrows this item further as a Product. This way, search engine can potentially add this information to an online product catalog making your products easier to find. Other types are available as wel, for example:

Movie

Event

Organisation

I implemented this meta tags for a new webshop I am building. These attributes are part of the HTML5 standard and therefore cannot be used by an XHTML1.1 strict syntax without passing the W3C validation. To use these attributes, just declare your document as HTML5. You can then use the W3C validator to fix any validation errors which may arise. I think this is worth the exercise.